The Trust Lab is leading research on the interaction between humans and humanlike machines

Robots and autonomous agents are being designed with increasingly human traits so that they can collaborate better in human-robot teams. However, we do not currently understand the psychological impact of dealing with automation that has "humanness". Even without anthropomorphic characteristics, people often humanize decidedly non-human robots. As robots quickly transition from novelties to collaborators in the workplace, The Trust Lab seeks to understand the psychological implications of humans working alongside humanlike machines.

Director: Dr. Ewart de Visser

Dr. Ewart de Visser is the Director of Human Factors and UX Research at Perceptronics Solutions, the Director of the Trust Lab and an expert in human-automation collaboration design and research. For the last 10 years, he has specialized in developing advanced adaptive planning and decision aiding interfaces to support unmanned vehicle systems. Dr. de Visser has created novel design methodologies for developing unmanned vehicle interface support, metrics to assess human-robot performance, and developed new paradigms to support operator trust in complex automated systems. Dr. de Visser has also explored human-automation trust from different theoretical perspectives—cognitive, social, and neural. His Ph.D. dissertation dealt directly with the neuroergonomics of trust in automated systems for which he won an American Psychological Association Research Dissertation Award. Dr. de Visser has published numerous papers on his trust research and his human-automation design work. Dr. de Visser received his Ph.D. in applied cognitive psychology from George Mason University and his B.A. in Film Studies from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He also received his propedeuse in Cognitive Artificial Intelligence (CKI) from Utrecht University in the Netherlands.